European Doctoral Programme for Smart Urban Coastal Sustainability

The EU-DOCS for SmUCS programme is a European doctoral programme designed to train 17 PhD students based on cotutelles between La Rochelle Université (LRUniv) and its partners from the EU-CONEXUS European Alliance and beyond.

Based on a challenge-driven approach of research and education, it addresses the societal challenges related to Smart Urban Coastal Sustainability (SmUCS), while strengthening cooperation within our alliance in order to enhance human resources for research and innovation in that area.

With 60% of the world’s population living within 100 kilometers of the coast and the “land-sea” interface threatened by climate change and the sea level rise, LRUniv has been leading a consistent strategy of combining its forces in research and education in order to define, understand and address the related challenges.

These challenges threaten local economies and quality of life of populations, and may take very different forms, from risks related to the artificialization of shorelines, destruction and pollution of wetlands and biodiversity, vulnerability of coastal towns, massive migratory flows, the impacts of unregulated mass tourism, or energy losses related to ageing constructions and lack of urban policies and risk governance.

Such complex and interdependent challenges require interdisciplinary approaches at an international level, getting academic and non-academic actors to work together on sustainable and resilient solutions.

Building on the combined strengths of its partners, our programme will train a generation of highly skilled researchers through 36-months thesis, able to tackle these issues with comprehensive approaches, a strong international network and a solid training on research-related and transversal skills, leading to their increased employability within academia and beyond after graduation.

This programme is anchored in three fundamental principles, PhD Cotutelles, Excellence and interdisciplinarity and Transversal skills.